1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an output control apparatus and output control method in which a desired printer is selected and an ability of a corresponding printer driver is recognized.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally speaking, when graphics prepared by a graphics system are printed, graphics commands issued from an application program (hereinafter referred to simply as xe2x80x9capplicationxe2x80x9d) are converted by a graphics engine and a printer driver into commands and data which can be printed by a printer connected to the system. The graphics engine performs conversion of logical coordinates to physical ones, conversion of the graphics commands into a form which allows processing by the printer driver, and conversion into image data of such graphics commands as cannot be drawn by the printer driver. The printer driver converts the graphics commands into image data and character data in accordance with instructions from the graphics engine, and then transmits the data to the printer after adding printer commands thereto.
The figure commands of the graphics commands from the application have conventionally been processed, for example, by one of the following methods:
(1) The graphics engine recognizes the figure drawing ability of the printer driver, decomposes the figure commands into figures which can be drawn by the printer driver, and then calls the printer driver (for example, where the application has issued a circle drawing command when the printer driver has no figure drawing ability, the graphics engine decomposes the circle into an aggregation of dots, and then repeatedly requests the printer driver to perform dot drawing).
(2) The graphics engine unconditionally converts the figure commands into image data and transfers it to the printer driver.
A problem with method (1) is that all figures are replaced by the aggregation of dots when the printer driver has no figure drawing ability, which means the graphics engine has to call the printer driver a number of times corresponding to the number of dots, resulting in the system performing rather poorly.
Method (2) has a problem in that even when the printer driver or the printer has a figure drawing ability, it has to remain unused, which also causes the system to perform poorly.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an output control method according to which the graphics engine takes into account the figure drawing ability of the printer driver as recognized by a printer-driver-figure-drawing-ability detecting means; when it is determined that the printer driver has no figure drawing ability, figure commands are converted into image data by the graphics engine and then transferred to the printer driver; and when it is determined that the printer driver has a figure drawing ability, the graphics engine decomposes figure commands into a figure which can be drawn by the printer driver and then transfers it to the printer driver.
Further, it is an object of the present invention to provide an output control apparatus and output control method in which a desired printer is selected and in which to perform printing through a printer driver corresponding to this printer, the drawing ability of this printer driver is recognized so that it can be determined whether to convert a figure designated by graphics commands into image data or not in accordance with the recognition result.